A dictator commands your body. A drill sergeant commands your time. An employer commands your labor. Each of these takes something. The damage is real but bounded. You still own your own seeing. You can hate the dictator while obeying him. You can resent the drill sergeant while marching. You can disagree internally while doing the work. The authority got your behavior. The authority didn't get the part of you that watches.
K argued that spiritual authority is different in kind. It doesn't take your behavior. It takes your seeing. The priest, the guru, the teacher tells you what to perceive, what to value, what to call good and what to call bad. You internalize the categories. The authority becomes invisible because it has merged with your own perception. You're not obeying anymore. You're seeing through their eyes.
This is why K named spiritual authority as the most violent kind. Political violence leaves the inner observer intact. Spiritual violence colonizes the observer itself. You don't even know you've been colonized, because the part of you that would notice has been replaced. The teacher's framework feels like your own insight. The doctrine feels like your own conviction. The dependency is invisible because it has become the eyes.
Anyone who has tried to leave a religious tradition they were raised in knows this. The leaving is hard not because the institution will punish you. It's hard because the categories the institution installed are still doing the seeing. You catch yourself evaluating your own life by their criteria long after you stopped believing in them. The body knows. The reflex remains.
Spiritual authority takes the most because it takes the looking. Once your seeing has been colonized, no other authority needs to bother. You'll police yourself, using their categories, for the rest of your life. That's why K named it as the most dangerous kind. The dictator can be deposed. The teacher who became your eyes never leaves.